YULETIDE!

WHAT AN ECSTATICALLY WONDERFUL YEAR. I'll be going through the archive properly this afternoon and tomorrow, with Christmas and family and STAR WARS having taken up basically all my time off so far, but I have absolutely made time to read my gifts! MY GIFTS.

Serendipity (25771 words)Fandom:Dune - All Media TypesRating: Teen And Up AudiencesWarnings: Graphic Depictions Of ViolenceRelationships: Chani/Irulan CorrinoCharacters: Irulan Corrino, Chani, Lady Jessica, Leto Atreides IAdditional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, A certain amount of politicking, A certain amount of stabbing, Paul Atreides and the planet Dune will hardly be appearing in this ficSummary: Duke Leto survives his arrival on Arrakis, allies with the Fremen and forces a compromise with the Padishah Emperor. Five years later, Irulan - still unmarried - is summoned from her near exile on Dune as Imperial Observer to testify before the High Council of the Landsraad. Naturally, not all is as it seems. But the actions of the right woman in the right place at the right time can make all the difference.

This is an absolutely EPIC Irulan/Chani AU with completely accurate tags. The central premise is actually kind of fantastically tropey, Chani as Irulan's grudging bodyguard and then they slowly get to know each other and it's not so grudging and also bodyguard if-you-know-what-I-mean; but it is executed with such care and such Dunelike awareness of all the ripples and complexities and consequences. Just lovely!

This fic! This fic is absolutely everything I could never have hoped to receive based on the completely useless "or give me HB/John/Liz, if you want!" prompt I chucked into my letter. I love the Liz voice, I love the understated triangle of pining and caring and TEAM, I love the resolution. I JUST LOVE THIS WHOLE THING.

.... Would you belived that I hadn't realised how tropey Serendipity was until you pointed that out? From a meta point of view, I was just looking to get Chani into Irulan's world and force them to interact with each other, then Paul quite calmly offered to do the job for me, pointing out quite how he was gaming the outcomes by doing so. I mean, yes, asking Chani to protect Irulan and tying the future of Arakis to it did maximise the chances that Irulan wouldn't be forcibly married off to one faction or another (a faction that would undoubtedly have its own plans for Dune that did not coincide with the interests of the Fremen to be sure)... but there was also a greater than even chance Chani would be killed trying to stop just that (especially by the Sardaukar) and, y'know, Paul would be ideally placed to take advantage of that Fremen outrage. The fact that this happened to coincide with the bodyguard trope was kind of a coincidence.

:D I honestly hadn't realized it either, until I was writing this post and trying to decide how to summarize it, and then I paused and said to myself ... wait a minute. But it's so WONDERFUL that way, it's exactly the kind of tropefic I like best, because the trope is there but it's done with so much care and consideration of the characters and the setting and the details that it almost loses its tropiness. Because, yes, it absolutely does make sense in context, and it's not treated as a paint-by-numbers scenario at all, and ugh it's just so great. SERIOUSLY, THANK YOU.